News

Orangutan Letter Writing Campaign

Since starting OMG, Olivia and Carter have been extremely busy and have started many initiatives. Today we are launching our latest Animal Conservation Campaign called our Orangutan Letter Writing Campaign. Before you view our YouTube PowerPoint presentation, we encourage you to view this short video by Greenpeace Indonesia that explains the environmental threats caused by the deforestation of the peat swamps where orangutan call their home.

Working off of the success of our rhino campaign, we have created a easy to use powerpoint presentation which can be accessed via our YouTube channel below. We encourage you to share the presentation with others and consider hosting your own presentation event with your friends, classmates and community about the plight of orangutans. You can stop the video while your students learn from each slide and just hit ‘play’ again when they are ready to go on to the next slide. There is now sound with the video. The file size was too large so we had to convert the presentation to a YouTube file. Anyone interested in getting the full PowerPoint presentation, should email us (info@onemoregeneration.org) and we will send the file via our DropBox account.

Our Orangutan Letter Writing Campaign is designed to get people from all over the world to learn about the issues and show their support by writing letters addressed to the new Indonesian President asking him to please take a strong stand for Orangutan and help us save them for future generations. We have a ‘Pre-written’ letter template below which can be downloaded, signed and mailed to us or scanned and emailed to us. We also have a ‘blank’ letter template that you can download that will allow you to write to the President telling him how you personally feel about the issue. We even have a few coloring pages for the younger audience and we encourage everyone to get involved.

Here are several coloring pages which can be downloaded and printed for younger audiences. Please ensure they write their names and city/country location on the coloring page before mailing or emailing to us:

Please address your letters to President Joko Widodo and send them to our office at the address below. We will scan in all letters and post them below for the whole world to see. You may also email the letters directly to us at the email address below:

Also, our partners at TOP (The Orangutan Project) just launched a “Save the Sumatran Orangutan From Extinction“ petition and we are asking everyone to please consider signing on and sharing with everyone you know. As the President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo has the power to step in and protect the orangutan from extinction. We must act now to make sure he cancels the proposed spatial planning law that will enable greedy palm oil conglomerates to destroy the last remaining forests of Sumatra.

How Do You Spell Palm Oil?

Here are some of the names used to disguise palm oil in food labels. Image provided by Robert Piller – Campaign Against the Trade in Endangered Species..

Here is the most recent update from the UNEP and The Great Apes Survival Partnership (GRASP) meeting:

Borneo report book launch in Kota Kninabalu during the GRASP regional meeting

Here is a shocking video which shows the massive deforestation happening right now by greedy companies who are only concerned about profits, not about what they are doing to the world:

We have partnered with several international organizations to bring you the most up to date information on the issue and to provide you with ways each one of you can get involved in helping to raise awareness and work towards solutions. We teamed up with the folks at TOP (The Orangutan Project) who work directly on the front lines helping orangutans. TOP is the world’s foremost not-for-profit organisation, supporting orangutan conservation, rainforest protection, local community partnerships and the rehabilitation and reintroduction of displaced orangutans back to the wild, in order to save the two orangutan species from extinction. Make sure you visit their Orangutan Adoption page as well.

We also partnered with our friends at Rainforest Rescue who is also a nonprofit organization actively committed to preserving rainforests, protecting their inhainhabitants, and furthering social reforms. They have a wealth of knowledge and are experts on the issue of Palm Oil and what is driving the demand. We encourage you look at their website to learn from their Facts about palm oil and rainforests section and also download their free Palm Oil brochurekids-flyer-palmoil-a4.

We also are always on the lookout for organizations who are proactively working to help find solutions to the deforestation which is causing the species to be pushed to the brink of extinction. Olivia recently came across the website from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) which has a site called SPOTT. SPOTT stands for ‘Sustainable Palm Oil Transparency Toolkit‘. SPOTT is a project from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) to provide practical information and resources to stakeholders in the palm oil industry, in order to reduce its negative environmental impacts.

ZSL focuses much of its work in Indonesia, where the unsustainable production of palm oil and other commodities is a key driver of tropical deforestation, with vast tracts of rainforest habitat cleared, often burned to the ground, and typically replaced by a monoculture crop, the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis).

SPOTT features a companies scorecard assessing 50 of the world’s largest palm oil producers selected by market capitalization, land-bank hectarage, and stakeholder nominations by SPOTT users, who can use the company assessments to inform how they buy from, engage with, or invest in oil palm growers across the industry. Stay tuned as we reach out to them about ways we too can work to help create more sustainably grown palm oil use.

We recently received this cool link fromAlan Crowe who is with Crowes Saw Mills in Ireland. Alan created this interactive StoryMap called ‘Forests Most at Risk of Deforestation’ which highlights eleven of the world’s most at risk forests, the level of deforestation predicted per forest and the primary causes of deforestation for each region which you can view below:

We also have a link to a Palm Oil App for thoses of you living in Europe by the folks at ‘The Good News Team‘ who created the ‘CodeCheck’ App. When you shop in the supermarket for food or cosmetics, you can scan the barcode using the app with your smartphone and retrieve information about their content. The app quickly identifies what ingredients are in the products and whether they contain, among other palm oil. The site is in German but with Google, you can hit the ‘Translate’ button and have everything converted in your favorite language.

Here is a crafty TV commercial that highlights how some companies glamorize their products despite their devastating effect on our environment and endangered species:

Education is the key to true change and we all have the power to speak up when we see something is not right. We encourage everyone to speak up at every opportunity. Together, we can make a difference for at least One More Generation… and beyond.

Resource Center

Here is yet another reason why we all need to get involved. Greed is forcing the poor species to the brink of extinction. Check out this article published just this past Dec:

WE NEED LETTERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

We have received thousands of letters already from around the world and more are coming in daily. Each letter is assigned a number according to the order in which they are received. We plan to hand deliver all the letters we collect at a UN/GRASP Conference in Jakarta this Nov to the Indonesian government to show them that youth around the world care about saving orangutans for at least One More Generation… and beyond. Invite your friends and family members to also send us their letters as well. If you have contact to any schools, please share this campaign with them as well and ask them to consider allowing the entire school to get involved.

Carter and Olivia are available to make presentations at schools and we even host Skype sessions with schools and community groups who are interested in getting involved. Together, we can save orangutans for future generations to enjoy.

Thank you for caring and for your support from all of us here at OMG 😉

Watch Carter and Olivia present at TEDx Youth

OMG’s Address to the UN for World Wildlife Day

OMG Founders Deliver G7 Keynote Speech Canada

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